About the Strategic Inclusion Plan

The Strategic Inclusion Plan is a self-guided planning tool for early childhood and child care services accessing the Inclusion Support Programme.

All services receiving support through the Inclusion Support Programme (ISP) must develop a Strategic Inclusion Plan (SIP) for their service, in collaboration with the Inclusion Agency (IA).

A SIP is a self-guided inclusion assessment and planning tool for services that includes short and longer term strategies for improving and embedding inclusive practice. The development of a SIP recognises the current inclusive capacity of a service, and outlines the strategies and actions educators will implement to increase their capacity to include all children.

The development of a SIP is the first step to accessing support from the ISP including funding through the Inclusion Development Fund (IDF). Each service location will have one SIP, and may operate more than one service from this site. The SIP is implemented and evaluated within a 12 month period. A SIP can be updated during this period to reflect any changes, and record the progress made in implementing the strategies and actions outlined. The SIP will include an inclusion profile for each care environment a service is seeking inclusion support for.

A service’s SIP must identify:

The barriers that impact the service’s capacity to include children with additional needs; and

The proposed strategies and actions to address identified barriers to inclusion.